Reflections on a Reluctant Reader

Of all of the work I have done as a tutor, I am perhaps most proud of the work I did with Cassandra (of course, not her real name). Cassandra was in the seventh grade when we first met, and she had always scored either a one or a two on her New York State language arts tests. (A one is the lowest possible score and a four is the highest possible score; both ones and twos indicate that a student is performing poorly.) Her parents were frustrated by the lack of progress she was making in school and decided that private English tutoring was the way to go.

This was near the beginning of my tutoring career, and at the time I had never worked with a student like Cassandra before. She was a lovely girl; behavior problems were clearly not at the root of her academic struggles. She had never been diagnosed with a learning disability, and while she may have had one, she lacked obvious symptoms such as atrocious spelling and reversed letters. Her family appeared to be warm and supportive, and they clearly valued education. I had no idea what was the root of her problem, so I didn't have a clear idea of what to do to help her. The only think I could think of was to simply make sure she got a lot of practice reading and writing, so with some trepidation, I set about trying to make that happen. (Although we worked on both reading and writing, this essay is about the reading instruction that I gave Cassandra.)

When I asked Cassandra what she liked to read, she was unable to give me any answer. (Not surprising, since she didn't like to read!) Therefore, I decided to just pick books for her. We started with easy books from my personal collection. I wanted to make sure that we started out with books that were actually a little bit below her reading level in hope that this would break the cycle of her having difficulty reading, feeling bad about that, and then trying to avoid reading in the future. The Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl and The Toothpaste Millionaire by Jean Merrill are examples of early books that we read together.

I instituted a modified form of shared reading. When we were together, we would read the books aloud. I would start, read for a few pages, and then hand the book to Cassandra. Then she would read for as long as she felt comfortable, and when she was done, she would hand the book back to me. When I felt it was necessary, we would stop and discuss the book. For homework, I initially assigned her about 10 pages of reading per day.

As her reading became more proficient (and as I ran out of reasonably interesting, very simple books in my personal collection), I gradually introduced more challenging material and increased the number of pages that I expected her to read each day. I also began offering her limited choice. For example, after about three months, I would show up at a tutoring session with two books such as The Story of Madam Curie by Alice Thorne and Hatchet by Gary Paulsen that she could choose between. At this stage, I was assigning about 15 pages of reading per day.

After about six months of gradually increasing the volume and complexity of the reading that I required from Cassandra, she was up to about 30 pages a day and beginning to approach a grade-appropriate level of reading. Books that she selected from the choices I gave her included The Watsons Go to Birmingham- 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis and several titles from "A Series of Unfortunate Events" by Lemony Snicket.

After about eight months, Cassandra really was reading proficiently and she was also becoming interested in choosing her own books, without guidance. This was when we found out how wildly our tastes diverged! She kind of liked the books I picked for her, but it turns out she loved books such as A Child Called "It": One Child's Courage to Survive by Dave Pelzer. I wasn't familiar with this book, but started out eager to read it with her. That came to a swift end after I nearly threw up while reading a particularly gruesome passage. After that, we agreed to go back to reading books that she picked from a limited list that I gave her, but I searched for somewhat grittier tales. The Color of Water by James McBride is one of the books that we shared during this period. That was probably the most challenging book that we read together.

Ten months after we first met, Cassandra took her eighth grade New York State language arts test. She scored a fairly high three, and for the first time in her life was officially considered a proficient reader. Shortly after she got her test score back, her parents and I decided that my work was done, and Cassandra graduated from English tutoring. In ten months (about 40 hours of tutoring, plus many more hours of reading on her own) her reading level went up approximately 3 grade levels! I have rarely been so proud and impressed by a student's improvement.

Since Cassandra, I have worked with a number of students with low reading levels. Although I have not always had such dramatic results, I have found that this method of gradually and consistently increasing the complexity and volume of reading while also increasing the amount of choice the student has works well. I recommend it highly.